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Contentious Activities, Disrespectful Protesters: Effect of Protest Context on Protest Support and Mobilization Across Ideology and Authoritarianism

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Abstract

Protest is a tool more often wielded by the political left than right. Somewhat surprisingly, there has been little careful investigation of this asymmetry to date. I show that by examining how the protest context interacts with individual-level differences in ideology and authoritarianism, we gain insight into the protest asymmetry and the dynamics of public protest support and mobilization potential. Using an experimental design, I find that contentious protests and protesters that are disrespectful of police reduce public support, and that liberals and conservatives, and nonauthoritarians and authoritarians, are affected by the protest context in different ways. In my study, conservatives were found to be less supportive than liberals of protests that were disrespectful of police and were demobilized by violent protests. For authoritarians, however, violence did not decrease their support or mobilization. Rather, what decreased support and mobilization among authoritarians were protests that were disrespectful of authorities.

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Notes

  1. See Opp et al. (1995) for their broader theory, which includes party identification and selective incentives. Also see Dalton et al. (2010) for a similar point about the role of party id and political history.

  2. This means that protest is not inherently a liberal or conservative phenomenon, according to Opp et al. (1995), but one in which the meanings and experiences associated with particular ideologies affect individual protest participation.

  3. My results described below hold when controlling for beliefs about the effectiveness of protest and past participation in a variety of actions, including protest.

  4. This is similar to Leeuwen et al. (2015) concept of “atmosphere”—“the affective state that people attribute to the idiosyncratic features of a demonstration” (p. 84). Important to these perceptions are interactions with others, especially interactions between police and demonstrators.

  5. See the online Appendix for the geographic distribution of study participants.

  6. Replication data and Stata syntax files for this project can be found on Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/COZN1F.

  7. To my knowledge, no observational dataset is available that would allow me to test my hypotheses.

  8. During the first launch of the study on Mturk there was a mistake in setting the restriction to U.S. workers only, which is how some non-U.S. workers snuck in. The mistake was detected early and rectified immediately.

  9. Participants could not advance past the article until it had been displayed on screen for at least 20 s.

  10. Using Pew Research Center Polling results, these issues were identified as being the most polarized across partisanship in terms of the importance that Democrats and Republicans assigned to these issues. A table summarizing these poll results can be found in the Online Appendix.

  11. Full article wording for the anti-immigration conditions can be found in the Online Appendix.

  12. Note: The issues themselves were not used in random assignment.

  13. Full results in terms of which issues were chosen as most important can be found in the Online Appendix.

  14. Mean levels of authoritarianism using the American National Election studies range from 0.60 in the 2004 ANES to 0.62 in the 2000 and 2012 ANES.

  15. Random assignments checks can be found in the Online Appendix. Results show that random assignment effectively created equivalent groups in terms of gender, race, age, income, ideology, and authoritarianism.

  16. For the proceeding analyses, I pool all the samples and use the combined data, as there were too few conservatives in the student and blog samples to make meaningful comparisons using those samples alone.

  17. Because of the inclusion of the interaction term, the coefficients for each manipulated factor are interpreted as the average difference in peacefulness or respectfulness ratings for each manipulation when the other treatment factor is held at 0.

  18. Figure A2 in the Online Appendix plots these results for ease of comparison.

  19. The following results hold when controlling for a variety of other factors, including issue attitudes, beliefs that protest is an effective political activity, and past political behavior. Results also hold when using ordered probit regression, but for ease of interpretation and presentation, OLS results are presented.

  20. These results are substantively unchanged when looking across individual samples or when dummies for the different samples are included. Mean levels of protest support and protest intentions by experimental condition, including the full and individual samples, are presented in the Appendix. Across all samples, the same pattern of experimental effects emerges.

  21. Results that include dummy variables for each of the conditions and their interactions with ideology and authoritarianism can be found in the Online Appendix. The results are substantively the same and those reported in the main text.

  22. It is important to note that the differences emerged on the conservative end of the spectrum. Liberals were not mobilized by these conditions—the movement was among conservatives who were demobilized by violence above and beyond their relative disinclination towards protest.

  23. See Lipset (1959); Lipset and Raab (1978); Hofstadter (1967); Duncan and Stewart (1995); Duncan 1999; Duncan et al. 1997; Duncan et al. (2010) for work that attempts to examine authoritarians’ political activism.

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Acknowledgements

I would first and foremost like to thank Leonie Huddy for her guidance on this project. I am also grateful to Patrick Lown and colleagues from Stony Brook University and the University of Essex for their feedback on earlier drafts of this article. I would also like to thank Gelly for her ever-present support.

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  1. Department of Government, Essex Pathways Department, University of Essex, Colchester, UK

    Raynee Sarah Gutting

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Gutting, R.S. Contentious Activities, Disrespectful Protesters: Effect of Protest Context on Protest Support and Mobilization Across Ideology and Authoritarianism. Polit Behav 42, 865–890 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-018-09523-8

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